Of Book Trailers and Wedding Music

When I do things, I sometimes go a little overboard. Not crazy overboard, but I do lean towards the dramatic. Perhaps that’s because I was raised in a family that spent their summers working on summerstock theater. Perhaps it has something to do with my time at NYU’s TISCH School of the Arts. Or, perhaps it’s just the way I’m wired. No matter what it is, that fact remains, when I do something, I try to make it memorable, big, extravagant, dramatic. Sometimes this works out well. Sometimes…not so much.

Thirteen years ago this August I married my wonderful wife. I know. A wedding. The perfect time to bring out some of that drama. Right? Much to her credit, The Wife went all in as well. From our invitations, which were a hand wrapped box, with a handmade paper invite tied up with a little stick, to the RSVP card, which was in a wax paper envelope sealed with wax and a big L, we tried to make the whole experience one people would remember. Even down to the music. Not just the reception music, but the processional and recessional as well.

The Wife didn’t want to walk down the isle to some regular campy wedding march. She wanted something that would wake people up and get them into the ceremony. She had already picked out the recessional and we wanted something complementary. With a little help from a friend, yeah Chris I mean you, I found the perfect music, Riddle of Steel/Riders of Doom from Conan the Barbarian. Yeah, yeah. I hear the groans, but the director initially wanted a chorus based on Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, the opera we took our recessional music from. So the tone of the music matched. Plus, I love the movie. It’s really quite good, despite the acting. I mean, he punches a camel. Who does that?

So, we had our song. Now we needed some music cues. Music is below for reference.

Music starts — the groomspeople, we had a mixed party, walked out. It was at this point that Chris’s dad recognized the music and stood up to give us a bit of an ovation. At about the 1:36 mark the bridesmaids started walking (with convenient horns to trumpet their arrival). Then around the 3:00 mark our two bride’s boys started down the quite long isle with The Future Wife hidden behind them. At exactly 3:26 the bride’s boys separated and The Future Wife stepped through and continued down the aisle.

Now, some of you might be familiar with this movie. I hear you saying, isn’t this the music that plays while Thulsa Doom and his men destroy Conan’s town, killing everyone. Is that perhaps not the statement you want to make with your music…

It was really quite spectacular from where I was standing. And, we had a whole reasoning for why we did this. You see, The Wife is Swedish. Apparently, marriage by capture was a big thing with her Viking ancestors. They would go so far as to appoint guards for the bride to prevent her being stolen. Plus, it worked well with our music.

That’s all great Adam, but how about the rest of your post title. Some of us are here about the book trailer stuff. Lucky for you folks, I’m getting to that.

I recently put together my first book trailer. While writing the script for the trailer I started to think about music to use and Conan came to mind. What else would you play when monkeys are running amuck in a picture book? Sadly, it wasn’t in my budget. However, another similar song was. Our recessional. Remember the Carmina Burana song? Well, it seems that the MIT concert choir recorded the whole opera and offered it up under creative commons. You can listen to our song here.

Or, you can wait until the trailer debuts this Sunday May 5 over at Librarian’s Quest where Margie and Xena have been kind enough to offer the debut. It’s awesome. Both the post Margie has put together and the trailer. I can’t wait for everyone to see it. So, until Sunday…